


A Eulogy

by SpookySad



Category: DEMAFIC, Twenty One Pilots
Genre: F/M, M/M, Sad, Suicide, kissing while crying, tower of silence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-08-23
Packaged: 2019-06-09 15:56:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15270996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpookySad/pseuds/SpookySad
Summary: Jenna is missing. The Tower of Silence is the last place to be checked--and the last place Tyler wants to find her.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sure vultures eat hair too though, but it's not nearly as tasty

They leave DEMA in the dead of night, passing a wrinkled photograph of a woman between them to squint at her fair features by torchlight. Josh takes the picture to memorize her face; Tyler takes it to remember her, torch shaking in his head while his thumb traces the straight line of her blonde hair.

“Jenna,” he tells Josh. “That was her name.”

“Jenna,” says Josh. It is a pretty name, light, like the flutter of butterfly wings. “I’ve never seen her in person. Never even seen a picture. She’s beautiful.”

Tyler nods, jaw tight. He’s crying, not bothering to wipe his face because there are always more tears to come. Always more. “The hair is what you need to be able to recognize. The hair and the bones are usually the last things left.”

“She won’t be there,” Josh says with all the confidence of someone who has never lost anyone. Tyler’s lost too many to count on both of his hands. He needs someone else’s hands—needed Jenna’s. But now she is gone too. “Tyler. If she’s as smart as you say she is, they didn’t find out about her. Even if they did, she probably made it away to another Region. She’s hiding out. Not—”

Dead, is the word Josh won’t say.

They come to the door at the end of the tunnel, pulling their bandanas up over their mouths and noses. The yellow X across Josh’s chest glimmers in the torchlight when Tyler stops and turns to him. It’s just a little crooked, but Tyler thinks it will work to keep the vultures away anyway.

Tyler holds up the picture of Jenna. It’s the only one he’s got. “Just look at her. Look at her hair. Remember her.”

“I will,” Josh says, solemnly. His bandana moves where Tyler knows his mouth to be, his eyes flickering down to track the rustling of the fabric. “I promise you. I will. It means so much that you chose me. I won’t let you down.”

With a heave, Tyler pushes the door open. It is dark out here without a moon or stars. The wind brings sand and the faint stench of the dead, carried even so far away. Josh isn’t used to it. This will be the first time he has ever visited the Tower, the place for the dead. He turns and his torch falls into the sand, half of their light disappearing. The sound of gagging nearly makes Tyler gag too, but he holds it in, swallowing his spit, swallowing and swallowing.

They relight the torch and move on. The sand between the outermost wall and the Tower is packed down like dirt, trampled from decades on decades of use. The desert is quiet, and strangely, not any more desolate feeling than the empty streets of Tyler’s Region after curfew. The only thing missing are the tidy streets with the even rows of houses.

They walk well into the night, until their torches grow dim. By the fading light, they set up camp, rolling out their sleeping bags and making a tiny fire between them to keep the insects away, and to talk around.

“I never thought I would meet you in person,” says Josh. He’s propped up on his elbow by the fire, and the flames exaggerate the planes of his face and the darkness of his eyes. “Are the stories true?”

Tyler shrugs. He wraps his arms around his knees, lets the tips of his boots kiss the rim of the firepit. The photograph crinkles in one hand. He doesn’t need the fire to see her. She’s in his head all the time, every day.

“Tell me about her?” Josh asks, his face open and kind, like a child asking for a bedtime story. So Tyler tells him: the first time he and Jenna met in their Region; the secret meetings they held in the basement of their secondary school, gathering students who would become the body of the revolt, the ones who would help them overthrow Keons; how they had been ‘married’ in the rubble of the streets with his blood on their hands. Tyler talked of the happy times too: the way Jenna could make meals out of the eclectic ingredients they scavenged; how he would fold origami for her out of pages torn from censored textbooks; of the time she managed to fool seven Bishops into believing she was Sacarver herself.

The more he talks, the less it sounds like a tribute and more like a eulogy.

“I won’t know how to live without her,” he weeps. Windblown stand sticks to the tear tracks on his cheeks. Josh has sat up now, unconsciously mirroring him from across the fire.

“How have you lived without all the others?” Josh says. “Maybe you won’t want to live, but you can.”

Tyler drags his sleeping bag around to Josh’s side of the fire, then kicks sand on the flames until they are swathed in the darkness, resting close enough to hear each other’s stuttered breaths. He reaches out, takes one of Josh’s hands, and presses a kiss to his palm.

“Tyler,” Josh says, sad.

“Please,” he cries.

They kiss, all hot tongue and tears, until Tyler is crying so hard he can’t kiss anymore, until he shifts to be tucked underneath Josh’s chin, weeping into the yellow X on his chest. The picture of Jenna is lost somewhere, maybe pressed between them, maybe in the sand beside their bag. Tyler doesn’t find it, even when he searches frantically in the dark.

Sometime later, he sleeps, and when Josh wakes in the morning, Tyler is burying the ashes of their fire and smoothing the sand, his pack already rerolled and on his back.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sure vultures do eat hair. But they prefer eyes, and that's canon.
> 
> I suggest you go and refresh the previous 1k before reading this final installment. Also, please mind the warnings.

The further they walk, the stronger the smell grows. They see the birds first, a hundred, maybe a hundred-hundred dark, circling shapes in the distance: vultures. They are fat from gorging on the bodies of the dead, many lounging lazily outside the Tower as Josh and Tyler walk up the path that turns from trodden sand to paved stone. A few of them take notice as Tyler and Josh pass. One glance and the vultures look away—the yellow symbols on their chests show that there is no food to be had here.

Inside the tower, their footsteps echo on the stones. The smell can’t be ignored—it makes his eyes water and his stomach turn. There is no roof, and flocks of birds pass like clouds in front of the sun. He remembers the first time he was here with Jenna, the grim awe of the place. There are hundreds of graves, little shallow trenches cut into the rock. The majority are full, but few are fresh and watched over by the vultures who cling to the edges of the graves like mourners standing coffinside.

“Where should we start?” Josh asks. His hand is pressed over his bandana to ward off the smell.

Tyler points. “I’ll take this row. You take that one.”

It’s quick work, but it isn’t easy. Some of the skeletons are cleaner than others, bones bleached white by the sun overhead that makes him sweat. Even when it begins its descent, the desert cooling for the nighttime, he can’t stop sweating.

Tyler stares at each corpse like he will Know which is Jenna, like she will still be dressed in the Bishop’s robes they stole when she impersonate Sacarver, like she will be wearing her black combat boots and his jacket, the one she stole and claimed as her own. Mostly, he looks for her hair.

He comes to one trench that is circled by vultures, has to prod them out of the way even when one snaps at him threateningly. They get bolder at night, when their eyesight isn’t as well. Soon he will need to light his torch.

There is a corpse inside, almost picked clean. Clumps of their long, auburn hair are mostly left behind, though many strands are tangled around the beasts’ beaks. One snaps at the back of his neck, and he feels the sting of a wound and slickness of blood down the back of his neck. Tyler turns and puffs out his chest like a bird might, and the creatures shrink away at the sight of the X. He weasels his way out carefully. The vultures are well trained, but he has no desire to antagonize a flock of creatures that could pick his bones clean before the week was out.

 One hand clasped to the back of his neck, he continued down the line. How many of these skeletons were his brothers and sisters, those who had fought alongside him for freedom from mindlessness? How many of these corpses had lived and died thinking that the horizon ended where the sun and moon set over DEMA’s walls? Tyler didn’t know which was sadder: glimpsing a new life and letting it slip through your fingers, or never knowing that that new life exists.

A hand comes down on his shoulder. Josh is there, looking remarkably bird-like with his wild, dark hair and large curved nose. His features naturally set into a very grim expression, the delicate skin under his almond shaped eyes so thin and bruised, his full mouth downturned. He is very beautiful, Tyler thinks, very present. Jenna would have loved him. Josh has spoken—and Tyler has missed it.

“What?” he asks.

“You’re hurt.”

Tyler pulls his hand away from the back of his neck. It’s soaked in blood, and he knows the way his jacket and shirt cling to the skin of his back isn’t entirely due to sweat anymore. He wipes his bloody hand on his pants and doesn’t bother touching the wound again. “Did you find anything.”

Josh’s dark eyes shift. “I—I’m not sure. Maybe.”

“Take me.”

“The second row—the middle one.”

Tyler knows. The walk lasts moments, lasts forever, because he _knows_. It is Jenna. She is gone. His partner, his other half has been taken, stripped, laid out like carrion. It’s like he’s dying and his life is flashing before his eyes, but it’s his future: the future without her. It is the bleakest, grimmest thing he’s ever seen, and he has seen this endless desert, has looked Nico in the eyes. Nothing is worse than this. Nothing could ever be worse than this.

And the relief he feels when they come upon the trench, when they find and shoo away the few vultures picking through the bones of the corpse left behind, when he sees it is not Jenna—it is all so overwhelming. There is blond hair, maybe her length, but it isn’t the right shade, not at all.

“It’s not her,” Tyler laughs wetly. “Jesus fucking Christ. It’s not her Josh. Didn’t you even look at the picture I showed you?”

Josh does not smile. He wipes at his eyes. “Tyler,” is all he says.

“What? You think that’s her? You think that I wouldn’t—wouldn’t recognize her? Wouldn’t recognize my own fucking wife?” He wants to grab Josh by the lapels of his jacket, wants to wrap his hands around his throat and squeeze, wants to hit him for scaring him, for scaring him so fucking badly—

—but then he sees the ring. The skeletal hand has been disturbed, and the ring has obviously been picked at by sharp beaks attracted to the weak shine in the overhead sun. Tyler stoops down, crawls right into the grave to pick up the wrist still stained with spilled blood. He so gently plucks it from the finger, from that finger with the vein that supposedly goes right to the heart. It is the most non-descript piece of metal he’s ever seen.

When he rubs the pad of his thumb against the inside, his thumb comes away green.

“No,” Tyler says. “No, no _n-o_.”

“I’m so sorry,” says Josh.”

“ _No_!”

He runs his fingers through the blonde hair, long strands coming away from the torn scalp barely clinging to her skull. The ring burns a hole in his palm. Tyler collapses by her bones, a macabre mockery of the soft-edged body he’d leaned over while they made love, curled up against in the dead of night and at the height of noon. He can’t see anything for the tears in his eyes, can barely make out Josh’s shape standing above the trench. There is no consoling him; this feels like dying.

Tyler begins to gather her bones in his arms. “Help me,” he says. “No. Don’t help me. I’ll do it. She can’t stay here. She should be—be—”

“Okay,” says Josh. “Okay. We’ll bring her back. We don’t have to leave her here—but we shouldn’t travel at night.”

The vultures are diurnal, but there are other things in the desert that aren’t. They risked it yesterday evening, but moving at night, especially weighed down by the body—Jenna. By Jenna. Jenna—is an idea fit for fools.

“Alright,” says Tyler. He wipes at his nose with his wrist. “We’ll wait. For morning.”

“Let’s find some place to sleep, then.” Josh is so gentle, standing above him, hand reaching out to help him up out of the trench. Tyler imagines that that hand is warm, warm as Josh’s lips were the night before when they kissed.

“I can’t leave her,” Tyler says. He strokes at the hollow of her eye socket, remembering a blue like the sky and dark lashes. “She doesn’t like sleeping alone.”

Josh blows out a long breath. “Okay. But I can’t sleep in this place. It’s—it. It smells.”

Josh makes his camp just inside the doorway of the tower. When he stands, Tyler can make out the dim flickering light of his torch, the occasional sound of him shooing away a disturbed vulture. There are stars out overhead, but he doesn’t know any of their names. He curls up around Jenna’s bones and points at them, names them anyway.

She doesn’t talk back. She won’t ever talk back again. The thought is obvious, but it doesn’t hit him until the sun is rising. He is holding his entire future in his aching arms.

She is gone, dead, bones. Bones.

His mind circles these thoughts like a record on loop, obsessed as he absently picks at the yellow tape on his chest. It comes off in one long strip, a hiss. He wads it with his fingers, sticky, thinking of the songs Jenna would hum while she cooked. He tries to remember one and hum it by memory, but it sounds wrong. It sounds so wrong.

Above him, a vulture peeks its head over into the trench. Tyler can almost see through its eyes: himself, Jenna, bones and flesh and breakfast. He aims the wad of tape at it, the chest of his jacket naked now, throws and misses. Another vulture joins it in peering in, both of them shying away from the tape. He slips Jenna’s ring onto his pinky finger, fingers stroking the delicate bones of her hands. And across the tower, Josh sleeps on.

Vultures can pick a body clean within minutes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently I never posted the ending of this--oof. 
> 
> Find me on twitter @ Spooky_Sad. Comment please <3
> 
> Thanks to adsnoggin, Alysha A., Sam P., Brea M., Sam W., Aubrey S., Kenzie G., and Babs K.

**Author's Note:**

> This was going to be a one shot but Tyler was like "Let's make camp and talk!!!" so I listened to him. Part 2 should be out this weekend. Celebrating those pilots putting out two kick ass songs, and one beautiful music video. Visit me on Twitter at Spooky_Sad; I'm getting my wisdom teeth out tomorrow, so it's going to be wild. Also, please PLEASE mind the tags guys. Stay safe. ||-//


End file.
